Using Electronic Documents for Knowledge Acquisition and Model Maintenance

Knowledge acquisition and model maintenance are key problems in knowledge engineering to improve the productivity in the development of intelligent systems. Although historically a number of technical solutions have been proposed in this area, the recent experience shows that there is still an important gap between the way end-users describe their expertise and the way intelligent systems represent knowledge. In this paper we propose an original way to cope with this problem based on electronic documents. We propose the concept of intelligent document processor as a tool that allows the end-user to read/write a document explaining how an intelligent system operates in such a way that, if the user changes the content of the document, the intelligent system will react to these changes. The paper presents the structure of such a document based on knowledge categories derived from the modern knowledge modeling methodologies together with a number of requirements to be understandable by end-users and problem solvers

Appendix for book chapter "Optimisation of robotic disassembly sequence plans for sustainability using the multi-objective bees algorithm"

Appendix A consists of input data and Appendix B consists of the experiment results

Research data supporting the publication "A multiobjective decision-making approach for modelling robotic disassembly for sustainable remanufacturing"

The files consist of input data for the gear pump using robotic for disassembly sequence planning and selected results of the experiments

Mobile Services Meet Distributed Cloud: Benefits, Applications, and Challenges

As the explosive growth of smart devices and enormous new applications, the variety of corresponding cloud services has been growing quickly. The conventional centralized cloud was faced with an overhead on backhaul links and high latency. Accordingly, a decentralized cloud paradigm including edge computing, mobile edge computing, cloudlet, and so on, was introduced to distribute cloud services to the edge network which located in proximity to mobile devices few years ago. However, this paradigm was not paid attention at that time since cloud technology and mobile network communication were immature to motivate mobile services. Recently, with the overwhelming growth of mobile communication technology and cloud technology, distributed cloud is emerging as a paradigm well equipped with technologies to support a broad range of mobile services. The 5G mobile communication technology provides high-speed data and low latency. Cloud services can be automatically deployed in the edge networks quickly and easily. Distributed cloud can prove itself to bring many benefits for mobile service such as reducing network latency, as well as computational and network overhead at the central cloud. Besides, we present some applications to emphasize the necessity of distributed cloud for mobile service and discuss further technical challenges in distributed cloud

Numerical study on bending response of precast segmental concrete beams externally prestressed with FRP tendons

This study numerically investigates the bending response of dry key-jointed precast segmental concrete girders/beams (PSCBs) prestressed with external fiber reinforced polymer (FRP) tendons by using commercial finite element analysis (FEA) software Abaqus/CAE. The experimentally-validated model was used to conduct an intensive parametric analysis with a focus on the second-order effect. There has not been a similar numerical study of PSCBs with external FRP tendons in the published literature yet. The results showed that due to the rectilinear rigid-body bending shape, the behavior of PSCBs with external tendons was similar to that with internal tendons only if placing the deviators next to the opening joints. The second-order effect on the beam's behavior and the harping effect on the tendon stress at deviators became more obvious when the deviators were located away from the opening joints. Both the second-order and harping effect were proportionate to the beam's displacement. Therefore, using a high reinforcing index (ω) or a low span-to-depth ratio (L/dp) could mitigate the second-order and harping effect at the ultimate stage because the ultimate displacement of the beam decreased when increasing ω or reducing L/dp. Commonly-used CFRP tendons (Young's modulus Ep = 145 GPa) were found to be the optimum to replace steel tendons in PSCBs with external tendons because they offered the PSCBs similar strength and ductility compared to steel tendons. The use of high-modulus CFRP tendons (e.g. Ep = 200 GPa) improved the stiffness and strength of PSCBs but greatly reduced the beam's ductility. Lastly, the analytical analyses showed that the existing models yielded unconservative estimations of the effective depth (dpu) and stress (fpu) of external FRP tendons at the ultimate stage in PSCBs

Thermo-hydro-mechanical responses of the host rock in the context of geological nuclear waste disposal

Deep geological disposal facility has been considered as the most appropriated solution for the safe longterm management of high-level radioactive waste (HLW). Geologic disposal solution consists of isolating the radioactive waste from the biosphere. Argillaceous rock has been selected in several countries as host formation due to its favorable properties to isolate radionuclides and chemical contaminants (very low permeability, stable, high retention capacity, self-sealing, etc). Clays in their natural state is usually saturated. Disposal of the exothermic waste packages in the repository leads to an increase in temperature within the host rock, which induces the pore pressure build-up due to the difference in thermal expansion coefficients of the pore water and the solid skeleton. The excess pore pressure generally leads to a decrease in the effective stress and can provoke thermally hydraulic fracturing or shear failure. Therefore, understanding the thermo-hydro-mechanical (THM) responses of the saturated host rock due to the heat generated form waste packages is a key issue to assess the feasibility of the repository. This paper aims at presenting coupled THM constitutive equations for a saturated porous medium and its finite element (FEM) discretization and solution. The solution is validated against analytical solution and other numerical results from a benchmark within an international project. FEM program is then used to describe the THM behavior of the host rock around a HLW repository (i.e. near field responses). Sensitivity analysis were performed to evaluate effect of material anisotropy and hydraulic condition on the micro-tunnel wall

Application of the bees algorithm to the selection features for manufacturing data

Data with a large number of features tend to be deficient in accuracy and precision. Some of the features may contain irrelevant information caused by data redundancy or by noise. A “wrapper” feature selection method using the Bees Algorithm and Multilayer Perception (MLP) networks is described in this paper. The Bees Algorithm is employed to select an optimal set of features for a particular pattern classification task. Each “bee” represents a possible set of features. The MLP classification error is computed for a data set with those features. This information is supplied to the Bees Algorithm to enable it to select the combination of features producing the lowest classification error. The proposed method has been tested on data collected in semiconductor manufacturing. The results presented in the paper clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of the method

Fast Approximation of Nonlinearities for improving inversion algorithms of PNL mixtures and Wiener systems

This paper proposes a very fast method for blindly approximating a nonlinear mapping which transforms a sum of random variables. The estimation is surprisingly good even when the basic assumption is not satisfied.We use the method for providing a good initialization for inverting post-nonlinear mixtures and Wiener systems. Experiments show that the algorithm speed is strongly improved and the asymptotic performance is preserved with a very low extra computational cost

Underdetermined instantaneous audio source separation via local Gaussian modeling

International audienceUnderdetermined source separation is often carried out by modeling time-frequency source coefficients via a fixed sparse prior. This approach fails when the number of active sources in one time-frequency bin is larger than the number of channels or when active sources lie on both sides of an inactive source. In this article, we partially address these issues by modeling time-frequency source coefficients via Gaussian priors with free variances. We study the resulting maximum likelihood criterion and derive a fast non-iterative optimization algorithm that finds the global minimum. We show that this algorithm outperforms state-of-the- art approaches over stereo instantaneous speech mixtures

Compositional consequences of partial dealcoholization of red wine by reverse osmosis-evaporative perstraction

This study investigated compositional changes in red wines resulting from wine alcohol removal by reverse osmosis-vaporative perstraction (RO-EP) and provides insight into the physical and chemical changes in reduced alcohol wine (RAW). Trial 1 involved RO-EP treatment of three wines that were analyzed pre-treatment, post-treatment, and post-treatment with alcohol adjustment (i.e., addition of ethanol to achieve the original alcohol content). Trial 2 involved partial dealcoholization of two wines and analysis of samples collected during RO-EP treatment, i.e., wine in, wine out, retentate, permeate (pre- and post-EP treatment) and strip water. Wine color was analyzed by spectrophotometric methods, while other compositional changes were determined by WineScan, high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) and gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) analyses. In general, RAWs were slightly more concentrated than pre-treatment wines, which resulted in greater color intensity and increased phenolics and organic acids. However, partial dealcoholization resulted in lower concentrations of some fermentation volatiles, particularly ethyl esters, which may reflect ester hydrolysis following ethanol removal.Duc-Truc Pham, Vanessa J. Stockdale, David Wollan, David W. Jeffery, and Kerry L. Wilkinso